My was to complete a experiment successfully to find out if chunking information affects your memory and to see if Millers theory is correct. I have been using the experimental method as this had many advantages like I could control the variables and I have past experience with writing experiments up. I used fellow class mates to carry out my experiment and were all from the same college and of the same age. My results show that chunking information does help to increase memory in your STM and so I can conclude that Millers theory was correct.
Introduction I am going to be investigating if chunking affects your memory. I will be setting up two groups each consisting of 10 people. 1st group will have a letter string, which has 24 letters with no gaps in between; they will all be abbreviations of real things but in just 1 long list. The 2nd group will have the same abbreviations but with gaps in between each abbreviation. Each group will be having the exact same abbreviations to try and keep my experiment as fair as possible.
There are two basic types of memory, which in 1890 was discovered by William James. There was knowledge or information, which he believed, lasted for a very short period of time known as STM (short term memory) and there was knowledge or information, which he believed, lasted a long period of time known as LTM (long term memory). There are 3 ways in which STM differs from LTM, which are encoding, storage and retrieval.
Encoding is basically how information is stored. In STM there are two ways, visually and acoustically. Visually is when u can see what is going on and store it as pictures in your brain and acoustically is repeating it to your self so it becomes a sound which you remember, this is seems to be the best way to remember for your STM. In LTM there are the two same ways of remembering as your STM but in LTM you also have the advantage of remembering by semantically.
Semantically is when u make meaning of a situation an example is if you watched a TV program the night before and your friend ask you what happened you wont remember the dialogue exactly but you will be able to explain what happened in your own words which suggest that you encoded that information in your LTM. STM has a very limited storage capacity. STM can only hold + or – 2 items so if too much information enters STM some of it will be pushed out.
However we can retain more then 7 items if we chunk information into something that is easier to remember and group things that make sense to us, this way we are able to remember up 24 things. In STM we can only remember things up to 30sec. In LTM we have unlimited storage capacity. The duration of STM is no longer than 30sec founded by Peterson and Peterson (1959) while in your LTM your memory may last from up to a few minutes to a lifetime.